The unusually intact fossilized skull of a giant, bony-toothed seabird that lived up to 10 million years ago was found on Peru’s arid southern coast, researchers said Friday.

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The museum said in a statement that the birds had wingspans of up to 20 feet (6 meters) and may have used the toothlike projections on their beaks to prey on slippery fish and squid. But studying members of the Pelagornithidae family has been difficult because their extremely thin bones — while helpful for keeping the avian giants aloft — tended not to survive as fossils.

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With fossils discovered in North America, North Africa and even Antarctica, Kepska said, the birds were ubiquitous only a few million years before humans evolved and scientists puzzle over why they died out. Some believe they are related to gannets and pelicans, while other say they are related to ducks.

It’s not exactly what Comfort had in mind, but close enough, dammit. It had toothlike projections, it flew… what else do you need.

Would’nt it still need to make the leap from bird to reptile? Feathers to skin? Toothy beaks prove nothing.

Clearly this is not a transitional form between reptiles and birds, look to your theropod dinosaurs for that. This is a bird that evolved a large toothed beak that allowed it to grasp slippery sea life. The resemblance to a crocodile is at most an example of convergence and at least a coincidence.

Would’nt it still need to make the leap from bird to reptile? Feathers to skin?

Uh, wrong way around.

Toothy beaks prove nothing.

When it comes to unfalsifiable creation, that’s a tautology.

David Marjanovi?

Toothy beaks prove nothing.

And they’re not meant to. Have you read the quoted article? The “bony-toothed” part is a clumsy way to express that these are not teeth. They are outgrowths of the jawbone, covered by outgrowths of the beak. Nobody ever claimed this entirely modern bird is transitional between modern birds and toothed birds.

Birds with real teeth existed earlier. Try Aberratiodontus or Yanornis or Sinornis or good old Ichthyornis, Hesperornis, and Archaeopteryx (possibly depending, for the latter, on your definition of “bird”).

David Marjanović

Looks like this blog isn’t Unicode-compliant. Here’s what my name is supposed to look like.

Mark Terry

That picture of the ‘crocoduck’ is actually from http://www.worth1000.com , which is an image manipulation website with artificial creations. But I assume you are just trying to be humorous.

The most interesting, underreported and creationism shattering detail is that they were able to use The Theory of Evolution as a model to predict WHAT they were looking for and WHERE they would find it before they had dug anything up.